A Timeline of Interference: How Trump and Russia Targeted Georgia Election

Back in October 2017, in Atlanta-Fulton County, the current scene of the indictment and pending prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, social media began to buzz with the realization that Russian Ambassador Sergeii Kislyak had visited the Georgia election center at Kennesaw State University (KSU) in the run-up to the 2016 election.

In the same October 2017 time frame, word had just leaked out that the servers at the KSU election center were wiped clean the day after Secretary of State Brian Kemp and former Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens received notice of a legal proceeding seeking access to the KSU servers – to search for evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 election.

Social media’s after-the-fact connection of those two data points did not prompt an investigation by the Georgia Attorney General, any local district attorney or the Department of Justice (DOJ) under new Trump administration, or even local media investigative reporting.

Instead, in November 2017, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (the AJC, as it is colloquially known) scoffed at the notion that there was anything untoward about Kislyaks’s pre-election visit to KSU, despite unconfirmed reports Kislyak was given a tour of the Georgia election center on campus.

The AJC snarked about Trump’s 5-point victory in Georgia, as if the comfortable victory rendered any Russian intrigue pointless—forgetting that Hillary Clinton led in Georgia polls prior to the election.

 With subsequent elections under greater scrutiny, Georgia’s decades-long reliability for Republicans has since been sorely tested with Biden’s victory and the election of two Democratic US Senators.

But the AJC saved its real ridicule – of ‘conspiracy theorists’ – for the source of the revelation of the Kislyak visit, a one-sentence blurb among a list of international accomplishments in Kennesaw State’s own glossy alumni magazine.

The AJC’s curt dismissal of concerns shows how the media was slow to adapt to the three big lessons of the Trump era:

1) Things were never what they seemed to be at the time as the Trump-Russia saga unfolded. News stories on Facebook that the Pope endorsed Trump, and a Twitter account apparently representing the Tennessee GOP, were both creations of a Russian troll farm in St Petersburg, frequently retweeted by the Trump family and campaign officials. The Obama administration’s tepid warning of Russian election meddling did not convey the storm that was coming.

2) Crimes were frequently hidden in plain sight. Trump’s call for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, soliciting a felony from a foreign adversary, was broadcast on national TV, as was his incitement of a mob of supporters to stop the electoral count. Trump said don’t believe your eyes and ears, and Atlanta media obliged on the Kislyak visit to KSU.

3) Many of the open transgressions of laws and norms, nonetheless, began in darkness. When the New York Times brought it to daylight, Trump concocted a fake story that the Trump Tower meeting with Russian government agents was about adoptions, not sanctions or stolen emails. Then there were the initial attempts at secrecy by the fake electors, now charged in the Fulton County indictment.

Though the AJC lampooned the idea that a nefarious scheme would be outed by the KSU alumni relations department recounting Kislyak’s visit, details overlooked by the pundits also hinted that the Kislyak visit was not what it seemed, either.

Start with the strange secrecy. Dr. Dan Papp, KSU President at the time and a Russia scholar, had no knowledge the Russian Ambassador to the United States visited his university in April 2016. Papp certainly had no way of knowing that an indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, filed more than two years later, would charge Russian agents with cyber-attacks on Georgia’s election system that followed the Kislyak visit to the KSU campus.

A stronger bolt of secrecy was the suspicious wiping of the KSU election center servers itself. And there was more dissimulation to come: then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and former Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, in response to questions from local media, both gave false reasons for this destruction of important evidence in an official court proceeding. The AJC reported those false responses, that the wiping was part of routine maintenance and was authorized by the FBI, without further investigation.

If Kemp and Olens’ misrepresentations were knowingly false, they would be chargeable as felonies under the same criminal statutes Fani Willis is now using to charge Trump and Rudy Giuliani.

That alone constitutes sufficient reason to investigate these events.

Yet there has been no investigation to date to explain exactly what Kislyak was doing on the KSU campus that day. We know, in hindsight, from the Mueller Report, that the Russian mission in the US solicited state election officials around the country in 2016, seeking to visit their election headquarters to learn, as if the Russian intelligence central directorate (GRU) was a fifth grade class on a field trip, more about how US elections work—a chilling thought in the after-knowledge that their mission, on orders from Putin, was to attack the US democratic process. According to Mueller, most states declined the solicitation to welcome Russian agents as observers during campaign season.

Was Kislyak’s visit part of that operation, and did Kislyak tour Georgia’s election center as the guest of Secretary of State Brian Kemp? In Georgia, the question has never officially been asked or answered. Nor has there been any plausible, innocent explanation of how the Georgia election center servers at KSU could be wiped clean with notice of an investigation seeking evidence of Russian hacking.

This alarming scenario only scratches the surface of a byzantine saga that raises questions of collusion between Georgia state officials and Russians in election interference going back to the 2016 presidential race.

This is perhaps best illustrated by a timeline of documented events that starts in 2014 with a Russian agent visiting Atlanta and the placement of remote-control malware on the KSU election center servers. It continues through the leak of the first US intelligence assessment of the pervasiveness of the Russian intelligence measures, the wiping of the KSU servers, and the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation that the Russians launched cyber-attacks on the election infrastructure of Georgia, as well as every other state in the nation.

The timeline tracks all the way to 2023 with the recent indictment and arrest of Russians and Americans working with them—for colluding to interfere with the 2020 election in Georgia, the very notion the AJC mocked as preposterous back in 2017.

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A Timeline of Interference

February 2014 – In a quick sequence of events, Ukrainians revolt against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Kremlin-sponsored American political operative Paul Manafort – whose right-hand man was a Russian intelligence agent named Konstantin Kilimnik. Putin responds to the setback of his ambitions in Ukraine by immediately moving forces to occupy Crimea.

March 2014 – The Obama administration imposes sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and Putin responds by ordering an expansive cyber-attack on US elections.

November 2014 – As part of that cyber-attack, a Russian intelligence agent, later an un-named co-conspirator in the 2018 Mueller indictment, travels to Atlanta and reports back to Sergey Polozov, manager of the Russian troll farm’s IT department. Polozov ordered the procurement of servers inside the US to mask the origin of the Russian disinformation campaign. Were they procured in Georgia?

December 2014 – Servers at the Georgia Center for Election Systems, located on the campus of Kennesaw State University (KSU), are compromised by malware that allows a remote user to control them (an intrusion not discovered and publicly disclosed until January 2020).

April 27, 2016 – Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak was guest of honor at candidate Trump’s maiden foreign policy address at Mayflower Hotel.

April 28, 2016 – The next day, Kislyak gets an election-year tour of the Georgia Center for Election Systems on the KSU campus. The Georgia election center at KSU was run at the time by the University System of Georgia (USG) under contract with the then-Georgia Secretary of State, now Governor, Brian Kemp.

May 2016 – One week after Kislyak’s visit, a USG official visits KSU President Dan Papp and threatens to smear him with false allegations of financial impropriety if he does not resign. It was later established that the alleged financial impropriety – illegally paying Papp out of foundation funds – had been orchestrated by the USG, not Papp. Papp will be replaced as KSU president by the then-sitting Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens—who had documented knowledge of the USG’s alleged financial fraud and extortion of Dr. Papp.

June 2016 – Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort meet with Russian agents offering help from the Russian government—which the Trump campaign thought to be the rumored Clinton emails hacked by Russian intelligence. The Russians wanted to discuss removing the sanctions imposed for occupying Eastern Ukraine.

July 27, 2016 – “Russia if you’re listening…” Trump asks Russian intelligence to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on national TV. As later revealed in Mueller’s July 13 2018 indictment, the Russians responded by hacking Clinton the same day.

July 31, 2016 – Prompted by rumblings that the Trump campaign is trying to obtain Clinton emails hacked and stolen by Russian intelligence, the FBI opens an investigation into whether the Trump campaign is coordinating with Russian intelligence.

August 2016 – Concerned by growing speculation about Russian cyber-attacks, Atlanta security researcher Logan Lamb performs his own online investigation, finds and discloses major vulnerabilities in Georgia election system at KSU that make it severely susceptible to hacking. Georgia personal voter data and election staff passwords were left exposed on the KSU website for months.

Lamb discovered that there was an identified security hole – for which a patch had been developed two years earlier, but not employed by the election center. This security flaw allowed an outside hacker to take control of the site. Lamb was accidentally able to download the state’s entire database of 6.7 million registered voters.

Lamb reported the security issues to KSU even as the USG was moving to replace Dr Papp as KSU president with Attorney General Sam Olens. Lamb’s findings were not publicly disclosed until over six months later, in March of 2017, when he discovered the KSU election center had done nothing to fix the problems to which he alerted them.

August 15 – Based on growing reports of Russian election interference, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed designating state election systems as critical infrastructure, which would allow the federal government to assist the states with election security.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp reacted with vocal public opposition to federal involvement, accusing the Obama administration of subverting the Constitution and claiming there was no chance of Russian hacking [in fact, Russian disinformation and hacking campaigns were already underway, according to the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee 2020 report]. Brian Kemp was one of only two Secretaries of State who rejected the offer of federal assistance.

September 28 – Kemp testified in Congress in opposition to federal assistance to secure state election systems, including the Georgia election center at KSU.

October 4 – Chancellor Huckaby announces Attorney General Sam Olens as sole candidate for president of KSU in violation of Board of Regents policies on presidential appointments.

October 2016 – Internal emails show KSU’s technology staff acknowledged the elections system had “40+ critical vulnerabilities.”

Mueller’s subsequent July 13, 2018, indictment of Russian military intelligence agents specifies that they penetrated the election infrastructure in Georgia counties in October 2016, the month before the election. In response to the Mueller indictment, Kemp announced that the Secretary of State’s office was never breached by Russians. That was a misleading dodge since Georgia elections were not administered at his office, but at the KSU election center.